Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2008 I have come to really look forward to the annual mono-dramas produced in cooperation with Shakespeare & Company at Ventfort Hall each summer. The four I have seen – Morgan O-Yuki: Geisha of the Gilded Age, Dancing with the Czar and Fanny Kemble’s Lenox Address – each introduced me to a woman…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July, 2008 “I am a woman, I am an American, I am a mother, I sometimes write for television, and I sometimes write movies; I play the piano, I knit, I rail at the universe; I am angry, I am sad; I am a comic…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 “I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived…in a hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue – of course, they are neither.”– Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald in a letter to Scott, 1919…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 “Words fail Chekhov’s characters…lacking a Caliban or an Ariel to perform the actions they need, they are left only with resultant chaos because of what they avoid with words.”– Annie DiMario, Bakerloo Dramaturg Last summer while we were on vacation one of my…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 After forty years of reading and seeing Shakespeare, I had finally decided that “The Tempest” was my favorite of his plays. This decision was cemented in May when I was privileged to see a truly wonderful Tempest –a student production at Williams College (yes, it…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 This is NOT Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. I mean that both ways – it isn’t the one he composed and it is nothing like his version. This version, which goes simply by the title of Phantom has a book by Arthur Kopit (what…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 THE PROLOGUE I feel like Emily Litella. You remember, that character Gilda Radner used to do on the Weekend Update segments on Saturday Night Live back in the day. Emily was a sweet little old lady in a cardigan who never heard anything right and…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, July 2008 Alan Ayckbourn is a very popular playwright. Oldcastle has an excellent track record of producing his works. Their 1997 production of his 1975 Bedroom Farce was the most successful production in the company’s 37 year history. Four of the original eight actors are back in…
